In the prior art, it is generally known to provide methods and apparatuses for stacking individual packages (which may also be referred to as “boxes”) into one or more groups, in order that the groups of packages may be commonly transported to a remote location. Such prior art apparatuses tend to be grouped into “random” and “nonrandom” palletizing systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,175,692 to Mazouz, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Randomly Arriving Mixed Size and Content Parcels”, discloses a method and apparatus for stacking parcels with the use of a circular “carousel”-type conveyor which accepts packages and stacks them upon pallets such as 6. Certain “attribute factors” are used to select a parcel, such as toxicity, drop tests, crushability, fragility and content. An important part of the Mazouz disclosure appears to be the use of “voxels”, which are of “unit length”. The “largest common voxel” is determined for modeling purposes.
Although prior art such as Mazouz includes advantages, needs always exist for improvements over the prior art which provide improved accuracy and efficiency of pallet stacking, which is provided by the present invention.